The Late Novels: The Plumed Serpent and Lady Chatterley’s Lover

Abstract

IN Women in Love Lawrence offers the marriage of Birkin and Ursula as an alternative to the industrialized and will-dominated civilization that he detests, but already the Blutbrüderschaft of Birkin and Gerald suggests a dissatisfaction with an alternative that is limited to the relationship between a man and a woman. Aaron’s Rod carries this dissatisfaction further, and in Kangaroo Lawrence experiments with a wider political alternative. This is a failure, and Somers turns away to the dark gods as implicit in the Australian bush. It was a logical next step for Lawrence to attempt in The Plumed Serpent the imagination of an alternative based directly on the dark gods themselves.